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The Chill Barbarians of the North

The Chill Barbarians of the North is the title of a paper by J.R.R. Tolkien, read at a meeting of the Newman Society in Oxford during Hilary Term 1928.[1] The Catholic journal The Tablet reported on 7 April1928 that:

Mr. Tolkien, the newly appointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon, criticized the views associated with Mr. Belloc and maintained that the Northern culture was quite as real as the Latin, and that so far as observation of foreign lands was concerned the Romans were stupid and devoid of imagination. No doubt, the fact is that North and South have combined to form our civilization; but it has ever seemed to the writer that our literary inspiration has been Greek, apart from our own Northern sentiment and delight in wild nature which is the antithesis of either the Greek or Latin spirit.—[2]